“Watch it, but not alone”: the movie Stephen King compared to ‘Alien’ and early David Cronenberg
Horror fans are a unique and passionate group, often eager to consume any scary movie they come across, regardless of its budget or reputation. Whether it’s a highbrow “elevated” horror from A24 or a low-budget, obscure film they’ve never heard of, the experience of watching horror itself is the reward. Interestingly, even if many of these films turn out to be less than stellar, horror aficionados still enjoy the thrill, always on the lookout for hidden gems. When they discover one, they’re quick to spread the word to fellow fans. Stephen King, the ‘Master of Horror’ himself, is one such fan. When he advised his social media followers to watch a relatively unknown 2016 chiller — with the warning to avoid watching it alone — they wasted no time in following his recommendation.
In truth, King has been championing modern horror films for as long as he’s had a social media account. It’s a testament to the man’s love for the genre that, even though he’s seen and done it all in horror in the last five decades, he still gets a thrill from watching a new movie which spooks him. In 2024 alone, he has praised Late Night with the Devil, which he dubbed “absolutely brilliant”, and Strange Darling, “a clever masterpiece” he fell in love with.
While it was clear King was very fond of those films, though, and wanted them to be embraced by a rabid horror audience, they didn’t quite warrant warning his followers to avoid watching them on their own. He also didn’t compare them favourably to Ridley Scott’s Alien or the early works of body horror maestro David Cronenberg. Those are the kinds of comparisons which make the black hearts of horror fans beat a little faster, so when King used them to spotlight The Autopsy of Jane Doe, interest in the little-known film skyrocketed.
Directed by Trollhunter’s André Øvredal, Jane Doe stars Emile Hirsch and Brian Cox as a father-son coroner team who are presented with a strange corpse one dark, mysterious night. The unidentified female was found buried deep beneath the basement in the home of a family who suffered truly brutal deaths, which is unnerving enough. What is even stranger, though, is the fact that the exterior of the body has no visible signs of trauma, yet her insides are a disaster area. Her lungs are black as if they’ve been burned. Her internal organs exhibit scars that very much resemble knife wounds. The wrist and ankle bones are broken, while her tongue is missing. Oh, and she has Jimsonweed in her stomach – a paralysing agent derived from a flower native to New England.
As far as pitches for horror movies go, the skin-crawling mystery at the heart of Jane Doe is hard to beat. The movie expertly teases this out for as long as possible, relying on the excellent performances of Hirsch and Cox to draw the viewer in. Cox’s characterisation of a small-town coroner whose mind can’t quite grasp the otherworldly implications of what he’s seeing is particularly impressive, and it couldn’t be further from the fire-breathing Logan Roy performance in Succession he’s now best known for.
By the time all hell breaks loose and the characters discover Jane Doe is nowhere near as dead as she appears, Øvredal has the audience eating out of his palm. His direction is sure-footed, and he exhibits an adeptness at both creeping tension and gruesome action.
All in all, it’s no wonder King tweeted, “The Autopsy of Jane Doe: Visceral horror to rival Alien and early Cronenberg. Watch it, but not alone.”
